Chaos in Transit Systems

This document is presented as one of the necessary conditions that must be met to obtain a Ph.D. degree in the Engineering Faculty at Universidad de los Andes. Its purpose is three fold: first, to serve as complementary reference work on what I know is a research topic which I, and other researchers, will be following in the near future: chaos in transit systems. Second, as a tool for me in order to present a coherent compendium of the work I have been advancing on the past three years; namely the study of simplistic models of a vehicle interacting with traffic lights. Finally, in the third place, to comply with one of the Ph.D. program requisites. Throughout the time I have invested in the Ph.D. program, I have participated in various research projects within the research group that I am part of. So far I have helped to develop a conceptual model for a research center in Colombia (56), contributed to a paper that discusses how variation can be a useful concept for management (26), and focused the effort of the last years into understanding the conditions under which a simple traffic model is subject to chaos (49). This document will focus on the most recent of those projects.